I enter with two purposes very clear in my mind: exceeding 300 km/h and touching the knee when cornering. Beppe gives me a quick briefing: “Do everything I do. I’ll go very slowly, you follow my trajectories”. I’m not worried. I shot at Imola. I understood that following the trajectories is easy, you just have to go calmly. For 300 km/h I just open the gas. To touch with the knee, however, I could cheat by widening and narrowing the trajectories ad hoc. Entry to the track takes place with an entry lane with a speed limit of 60 km/h. There are pins, but the lane becomes so narrow that I wonder if I made a mistake: I won’t end up in the meadow with a completely wrong bike for the grasstrack?
In the meantime, I’m so tense and concentrated that I don’t notice how the bike is: if it’s uncomfortable, if I’m at ease, if the engine gives me pleasure, etc. Indeed, I won’t even notice if I change gears or brake… We enter the fateful 360 km/h straight, but we haven’t run up, we are slow, so the San Donato will pass away like a glass of fresh water.
But no. We get there at what seems to me modest speed. Beppe doesn’t even brake, but suddenly lays down the bike and disappears to my right. I go straight. It feels like you’re driving through a parking lot. I know I have to turn, but I can’t. The bike goes straight, damn it. Now: at Imola, the track is between 10 and 12 meters wide. Here between 15 and 20. The San Donato is 20m and it’s fortunate, because with a heavy braking I manage not to end up in the gravel. The Ducati Panigale has become Panicalein the sense of panic. Beppe is finishing the bend, he turns to look where they are and I imagine she is wondering “But where is kzz going?”. I am blown away. I don’t understand why he couldn’t turn. The next bend is called Luco and it goes the same way: I enter it slowly and I can’t turn. In practice, Mugello has no curves. I’m doing it all straight. Years ago, KTM’s Paolo Carrubba and I met up in Nevegal with a friend who had a Buell, but he wasn’t very good at riding it. He took a hairpin bend at a crawl, didn’t bend at all and ended up in the grass. To us two incredulous he said: “It was impossible to bend more, I wasn’t in it”. I’ve wondered for years how anyone could drive so devastatingly, but now I feel like I’m him. The problem is that I’m driving with absurd trajectories, cutting the track here and there, so I’m afraid that the others who are lapping (fortunately only two people) hit me right in, because of me. Because, as I said a long time ago, you take the lane on the track. And if someone as good as Marquez crashes into the other riders, who am I not to make a killing?
At the entrance to yet another screwed-up corner, the Correntaio, I take a look at the dashboard and understand the origin of my problems. I’m entering the corner at 155 km/h. It may be that the Ducati Panigale isn’t easy to corner, if in my background there are only enduro bikes, but it may also be that it’s not easy, with my experience, to slip into the bends at a highway multon speed. The fact is that Beppe told me to follow him and imitate him in all respects, but he never stops and folds up to his ears, it’s too much for a debut. I realize that here there are some optical effects that make it seem to go slow when facing normal curves, but when you enter them they seem much tighter as a radius. Speed effect, which I’m strangely unaware of. It pricks me vagueness that, if you ride a motorcycle with over two hundred horsepower, in a nanosecond you reach Concorde speeds, without even realizing it.
To which I would say on the fact of bending touching with the knee is the case to put a stone on it: here it would already be an achievement simply to be able to turn. After the Bucine curve, in which I break the World record for broken trajectory, we take the legendary straight. If I’m giving up the knee challenge, I won’t miss the 300 km/h challenge.
